Intervention details

GraphoGame Rime

Intervention description

GraphoGame Rime is a computer game developed to teach pupils to read by developing their phonological awareness. Originally developed by a Finnish University, the GraphoGame group of interventions employ algorithms that analyse a child’s performance and constantly adjust the difficulty of the content so that the challenge matches the learner’s ability.

The English version of GraphoGame Rime was developed by the lead grantee, the educational neuroscientist Usha Goswami, building on research into “rhyme analogy”. This is the notion that pupils learning to read in English learn not just through phonemes (“a”,”t”) but also rimes (“at”). Pupils sit at a computer, laptop or tablet with headphones on, and play the game for around 10 minutes a day. Instruction is focused on helping children to match auditory patterns with groups of letters (e.g. rimes) displayed on the screen. The game first focuses on rimes that are most common in English. But each child has a personal log-in, and the game offers increasingly challenging levels as they improve their skills.

Technology

GraphoGame Rime is a mobile learning game. Can be used on a computer, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. Pupils wear headphones.

Evidence Summary

The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) ran a project in 2018 investigating the effectiveness of GraphoGame Rime for the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and Wellcome Trust. The study found no evidence that the intervention improves pupils' reading or spelling test scores. The result has very high security.

The study found a mean effect size of -0.06 for primary reading.

The same is true when looking specifically at pupils who are eligible for FSM, the effect size for these pupils is -0.01 for primary reading. The security of this result is lower because the number of pupils is smaller.